I'm getting an external Drive for my Mini. My intention is to move my Itunes Library off the Mini's Drive onto the 400gb drive. Do you guys always leave your External powered up when the mini is in use? It would definatley need to be on for Itunes, any concernes with heat? I'm getting a Mercury Elite enclosure.

mine usually stays off. It's mainly for my nightly superduper backups (which will only run if it's plugged in) and other storage stuff, nothing like iTunes. I think it would be a pain to put my iTunes stuff on another drive, then again I have less than 20gb of music so it all fits nicely on my ipod. I got to the point where I started moving/deleting crap I never listened to or always fast forwarded through.

They stay powered on all the time. However, they both go into a powersaving mode where the drive spins down if they aren't accessed for a period of time. That solves the heat issue.

If I access them, they spin back up, which causes a few seconds of delay the first time you hit them, but it's easier than turning them on and off all the time.

That may not work with all drives. The spin down may be a feature of your external drives chipset. Some drive run all the time. I'm still thinking about getting one of those Rosewill enclosures like you recommended. I take it this is one of the drives that will spin down?

I wrote OWC because I was concerned about heat. The Mercury inside enclosure is alluminum, it has some vent holes in the case. You then slip the aluminum interir into an all plastic case that is completly encased, not ven holes. It does seem like the interior gets warm but it's hard to tell by the outside plastic which is always semi cool to the touch

That may not work with all drives. The spin down may be a feature of your external drives chipset. Some drive run all the time. I'm still thinking about getting one of those Rosewill enclosures like you recommended. I take it this is one of the drives that will spin down?

It's entirely possible that not all drives will spin down like mine do.

For the record, my drives are a Western Digital 160GB USB2.0 external drive, and the Rosewill enclosure with a Maxtor 160GB drive.

I don't have experience with enough external drives to guess which ones will spin down, and which won't. I'm just happy that both of mine do.